Kristin Fagerback, a Norwegian-American, works in PR at a Seoul startup and tours her Gangnam office with its beanbag seating and compost-to-sand machine. She says a degree in tech or computer science matters more than Korean language skills for landing a non-teaching job in Korea.
Chapters
Hi, my name is Kristin Fagerback and I am a Norwegian American living and working in Seoul and loving every second of my life here, and I want to show you how you can do it too. So first, first I'll show you a little bit around the office. So this is an area that you can go sit outside and work in the office. So yeah, it's pretty casual here. You don't have to dress up to work. So yeah, this is a part of Gangnam, and right over here I get a cool view of one of the Joseon kings' tombs. So we're just like casually touring across the street from where I work. Um, hello, brother. Usually walk down that street. Then I'll show you a little bit of the inside. So if you go this side, then you can see this area. It's also a work area, like outside. Um, this is 4th floor, but on the 2nd floor there's like a more traditional office area. But, um, yeah, so since I work for a startup company, they have a very Amazonian, um, culture. They like having open office and you kind of just like feel like you're going to work whenever you want. So usually there's beanbags in this area, little cubicles, whatever, to sit in. Yeah, so it's pretty nice. Here's the outside area I was just in here, and then over here we have a little like kitchen thing and then like a bunch of different kinds of like recycling trash. You can see it's written in English and Korean. Then there's this machine here that like you put food compost in and like apparently like turns it into like sand or something. It's really cool. And then here is like the chill room. Beautiful flowers over there. And like you can play darts. Darts over here. Yeah, Korea is pretty cool. 감사합니다. So to talk a little bit about how I like living in Seoul and yeah, so I love living in Seoul. I was living in Seoul last year, also working, and I'm back this summer. For another 3 months. And yeah, I think in order to understand why people love Seoul so much, they need to just come here and experience it for themselves and the beautiful life they can have here. So what I do here, I do PR work. I've worked in PR for a little over a year in the past while I was in university. And also, in my last job in Korea, I was doing some PR work. So yeah, I'm working for Wizpace right now doing English PR. I studied Korean for 1 year in university, though I wouldn't say that I could speak on a business level in Korean at all. So to get a job in Korea being a foreigner, of course it's easier, and you get probably promoted to a higher status if you speak Korean. Korean, but by all means, it's not a total necessity. It's better just to have a degree in a field that they're really looking for people here in Korea. So I'd say computer science and the technology realm would be really beneficial if you want to live in Korea and work get a non-teaching English job, work more on the business level. Of course, there's other jobs in the business realm, though. I'm saying from my experience. Last summer I worked in Gangnam as well, but not on the technology side like I do now. And I think the technology side is really nice. The culture of the company here is really good. And yeah, like, my coworkers are awesome, and I'm excited to share with you more experiences I had and how you can have it too.
